Respect, Opportunity, Achievement, Diversity
“Diversity, inclusion and strengthening communities where we operate have been part of our guiding principles for more than 60 years. The Enterprise Holdings ROAD Forward initiative will open new doors for individuals in our communities who are disproportionately affected by lack of access to resources in the areas of education, health and wellness.”
Carolyn Kindle Betz, President – Enterprise Holdings Foundation, November 2020
When we deepen Respect, we expand Opportunity. When we expand opportunity, we enable Achievement. And when we enable achievement, we unleash the power of Diversity in our neighborhoods and our workplaces.
In November 2020, the Enterprise Holdings Foundation pledged $55 million over five years to organizations that advance social and racial equity in the communities where the company operates. Donations made under the new Enterprise Holdings ROAD Forward initiative will encompass three racial equity gaps that need urgent attention:
As part of the Enterprise Holdings ROAD Forward program, the company is allocating $20 million across four nationally renowned nonprofit partners – The Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, UNCF (United Negro College Fund), Girls Inc. and Parents as Teachers – as part of our commitment to young people of color in underserved communities.
Through four distinct partnerships, the Enterprise Holdings ROAD Forward initiative will bring meaningful impact to local youth and families in the following ways:
- Early childhood development: Support for Parents as Teachers will enable the organization to broaden the reach and effectiveness of its proven early childhood education programs to better connect with the needs of Black, Brown and Native American children. Key objectives of the partnership include refining its curriculum for diverse audiences, creating professional development sessions, subsidizing cultural adaptations of existing programs, translating program materials in Somali, Spanish and other languages, and underwriting new data equity research.
- Youth health and wellness: Support for My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) Alliance will advance their mission to build safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of color where they are valued and have clear pathways to opportunity. Key objectives include supporting the 19 MBK Impact and Seed Communities in documenting and broadly disseminating best practices, lessons learned, and stories of inspiration and hope from youth and community leaders; and launching the MBK Framework to Affect Systems Change, which will help the hundreds of MBK Communities better define, document and increase their impact.
- Youth health and wellness: Support for Girls Inc. will continue their mission to help all girls grow up “strong, smart, and bold” by funding work to assess and refine the organization’s proven Social and Emotional Learning frameworks that address racial injustice and inequities. Then, putting the updated framework into action with education, training and mentorship facilitated through affiliate programs.
- Career and college preparation: Through UNCF, Enterprise will support more than 70 scholarships for first generation Black college students to cover critical, but often unmet needs that can create barriers to college completion or successful career transitions. Scholarships will support non-tuition related student needs such as emergency expenses, stipends to support extracurricular professional development, and educational loan repayment.
Additionally, Enterprise Holdings ROAD Forward will invest $35 million to Enterprise’s 70+ global operating teams over the next five years, empowering employees to identify the most pressing issues in their communities related to the program’s three focus areas and support the local organizations best equipped to address them. In many cases, this funding will strengthen and expand local efforts already underway in the form of employee volunteerism, in-kind donations and the like.
In conjunction with the Enterprise Holdings ROAD Forward initiative, the Foundation pledged an additional $65 million to Enterprise Fill Your Tank, a program launched in 2016 to address food insecurity – an issue that also disproportionally affects people of color in our communities. That brings total funding for both programs to $170 million over 10 years.
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